As schools' closure hearings begin, their students get a way out

Students who attend schools the city is shuttering for poor performance will be allowed to leave, under a new policy that the Department of Education is rolling out at school closure hearings that begin tonight.

For the last decade, the Department of Education has closed schools — more than 150 in all — through a phase-out process in which no new students enter but existing students stay on until they graduate, up to three years after the closure decision. By the time the schools finally close their doors, only barebones staff and program offerings remain for the final students.

“The past policy was sort of like saying, ‘We’re going to get divorced in two years but we have to live together until then.’ It was not tenable,” said Clara Hemphill, who has reported about the impact of closures on schools and students as the editor of Insideschools. “It seems only fair that children should not be trapped in a school that the DOE has deemed to be failing.”

Now, the department will give each student in phaseout schools a list of higher-performing schools to which they can apply as part of the regular transfer process. When the department decides which transfer requests to approve, students from phaseout schools will be assigned first, starting with the neediest students who are looking for a new school.

With the first crack at open seats going to students in closing schools, other students eligible under federal rules to leave their struggling schools could have a harder time getting transfers.

The policy change comes as the Bloomberg administration’s school closure policies come under increasing attack — including from mayoral candidates and legislators. It also is the latest shake up of enrollment rules since State Education Commissioner John King warned the city that its policies had created unacceptably high concentrations of needy students in low-performing schools. At many schools the city has closed, performance had fallen as populations of English language learners, poor students, low-scoring students, students with disabilities, and overage students increased, often after other nearbyschools were shuttered.

“How do we ensure where there are concentrations of [high-need students], there are adequate supports?” King said last year. “If not, how do we think about the enrollment system to make sure that students have access to schools that will provide the support that they need?”

Last year, the department committed to distributing midyear enrollees, who tend to be higher-need, across a wider array of high schools. It also pushed selective schools to admit more students with disabilities. Still, the schools it proposed for closure this year have many high-need students.

King has signed off on the new transfer policy, according to Marc Sternberg, the deputy chancellor in charge of school closures and new schools. He said department officials would promote the change at closure hearings that are set to take place at more than two dozen schools over the next two weeks. “We’ve got to do our job to make families know that this is an option,” he said.

Sternberg said the department made the change “because of a moral imperative we feel to provide all families with options.” He said he had been particularly struck by speaking with the mother of a third-grader at P.S. 64 in the South Bronx, where parents have asked the department to intervene in the school’s poor performance.

“This mother and child have been zoned for a school that has not been getting it done and now she will have the opportunity to exercise her right to choose a better option,” Sternberg said.

The transfer option will be extended to all 16,000 students at the 61 schools that are in the process of phasing out or will begin phasing out if this year’s closure proposals are approved next month by the Panel for Educational Policy. (The panel has never rejected a mayoral proposal.) But Sternberg said the department could not guarantee that all transfer requests will be honored.

“We do not — despite our best efforts — have the volume of quality seats that we need,” he said. “We will do our best to accommodate as many of those applicants as we can.”

Students whose transfer requests are not approved or who do not ask to change schools will still get the support they need, Sternberg said. The department groups phaseout schools in support networks that are focused on their unique issues, and officials say performance often ticks upward in schools’ final years, as students and teachers grow more focused.

Jawaun Daniels, a ninth-grader, said he would try to leave Bread and Roses High School, one of the schools with hearings tonight, if its closure is approved — “especially if the teachers get changed,” he said.

But Jaquan Strong, a 10th-grader, said he would want to say, as did Davontay Wigfall, who said he would not want to give up Bread and Roses’s basketball team.

Mary Conway-Spiegel, an advocate who works with students in some schools that are facing closure, said she would want evidence that higher-performing students would not end up leaving most often. She also said she worried whether principals would want to take in high-need students from low-performing schools, or be able to serve those students if they did enroll.

Letting students transfer, Conway-Spiegel said, is a poor substitute for not assigning them to strong schools in the first place. “It seems like it’s too little, too late,” she said.

And Hemphill said she thought the transfer policy would be unlikely to improve conditions in the school or even for students who decamp for other environments.

“It doesn’t solve the problem,” Hemphill said. “The schools will be in a death spiral for a couple of years, there’s still going to be some kids to save, and it still causes lots of disruption for the kids — but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.”

First Person: Why my education nonprofit is bucking the coastal trend and setting up shop in Oklahoma

The response when I told some people that Generation Citizen, the nonprofit I run, was expanding to central Texas and Oklahoma, quickly became predictable. They could understand Texas, probably because our headquarters will be in the blue-dot-in-sea-of-red Austin. But Oklahoma?

My answer: Generation Citizen is expanding to Oklahoma City because no one would expect us to expand to Oklahoma City.

Our nonprofit is dedicated to empowering young people to become engaged citizens by reviving civics education in schools. We help middle and high school students learn about local politics by guiding them as they take action on issues they care about, like funding for teen jobs or state resources for teenage moms.

I founded the organization after graduating from Brown University in Rhode Island in 2009. Since then, we’ve expanded our programming to Boston, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area. All are urban areas with wide swaths of low-income young people, unequal schools, and disparate power dynamics. Our work is needed in those areas.

At the same time, all of these areas have predominantly liberal populations. In fact, according to The Economist, they are among the 10 most liberal cities in the country.

Generation Citizen is a non-partisan organization. We do not wish to convince young people to support a particular candidate or party — we just want them to engage politically, period. But the fact that we are preparing low-income young people in liberal urban centers to become politically active complicates this narrative.

So despite the fact that we could work with many more students in our existing cities, we made a conscious decision to expand to a more politically diverse region. A city that had real Republicans.

As we started talking about expansion, I realized the extent to which the dialogue about political and geographic diversity was a rarity in national nonprofit circles. While several large education organizations, like Teach for America and City Year, have done an admirable job of in working in conservative and rural regions across the country, a lot of other organizations follow a more predictable path, sticking largely to cities on the east and west coasts and sometimes, if folks feel crazy, an Atlanta or Miami.

There is nothing wrong with these decisions (and we were originally following this trajectory). A big reason for the coastal-focused expansion strategy is the availability of financial resources. Nonprofits want to raise money locally to sustain themselves, and those cities are home to a lot of people and foundations who can fund nonprofits.

But a more problematic reason seems related to our increasing ideological self-segregation. Nonprofits lean toward expanding to places that are comfortable, places that their leaders visit, places where people tend to hold similar values and political views.

One of the fault lines in our democracy is our inability to talk to people who disagree with us (highlighted daily by this presidential election). And non-profits may be exacerbating this reality.

This schism actually became more apparent to me when our board of directors started having conversations about expansion. Oklahoma City had come to the top of my proposed list because of my personal and professional contacts there. But I quickly realized that no one on my board lived more than five miles from an ocean, and save a board member from Oklahoma, none had stepped foot in the state.

“Are we sure we want to expand there? Why not a gateway city?” (I still don’t know what a gateway city is.)

“We can hire a Republican to run the site, but they can’t be a Trump supporter.”

“Are we sure that we can raise enough money to operate there?”

It wasn’t just my board. Whenever I talked to friends about our plans, they’d offer the same resistance.

The stereotypes I heard were twofold: Oklahoma was full of bigoted conservatives, and it was an incredibly boring location. (The dullness narrative got an unquestionable boost this year when star basketball player Kevin Durant left the hometown Thunder. It became quite clear that a main rationale for his leaving the team was Oklahoma City itself.)

But as I met with folks about Generation Citizen’s work, I met citizen after citizen who was excited about our mission. The state is facing tremendous budget challenges, and its voter participation rates amongst the worst in the country. Given these realities, there seemed to be widespread recognition that a program like ours could actually be helpful.

I did not talk about national politics with most people I met. Indeed, we might disagree on whom to support. But we did agree on the importance of educating young people to be politically active, shared concerns about public school budget cuts, and bonded over excitement for the Thunder’s playoff chances.

Still, the actual expansion to Oklahoma will be a challenge for our organization. Despite our local ties, we are coming in from the outside, and we do have the perception of being a progressively minded organization. What will happen if one of our classes wants to advocate for open carry at schools in response to a shooting? How will my board handle working in a site where they wouldn’t ordinarily visit?

I am excited to tackle all of these challenges. And I would push other similarly sized non-profits to think about working in a more diverse set of areas. It is not possible to be a national organization and avoid entire swaths of the country. But more importantly, given these tenuous political times, it feels important to interact with people who may not hold our beliefs.

Nonprofits can’t fix our national dialogue alone. But by expanding where we work, we might help improve the conversation.

Meet Derek Voiles, the Morristown educator who is Tennessee’s newest Teacher of the Year

Derek Voiles, a seventh-grade English language arts teacher in Morristown, is Tennessee’s 2016-17 Teacher of the Year, the State Department of Education announced Thursday.

One of nine finalists for this year’s award, Voiles teaches at Lincoln Heights Middle in Hamblen County Schools in East Tennessee. He received the top teacher honor at a banquet in Nashville.

Voiles, who has been teaching for six years, has long shared his teaching practices publicly — on Twitter, through a blog he wrote with a colleague, and as a state ambassador for the Common Core standards. In recent years, according to a state news release, his classroom became a hub as teachers from across his district observed his teaching in hopes of replicating his practices, which often improved the performance of students far behind their peers.

“All students are capable of achieving great things, and all students deserve a teacher who believes this and will do whatever it takes to make it happen,” Voiles said in the release. He is also a doctoral candidate at East Tennessee State University.

Now, Voiles will gain an even wider stage, as Tennessee’s representative to the National Teacher of the Year program. He will also share insight from the classroom as part of committees and working groups with the Tennessee Department of Education.

All nine Teacher of the Year finalists, representing each of the state’s regions, will serve on the Commissioner Candice McQueen’s Teacher Advisory Council during the 2016-17 school year.

The department also recognized two division winners from Middle and West Tennessee. Cord Martin, a music education and enrichment teacher at Whitthorne Middle School in Maury County, was recognized for his innovative teaching strategies and connecting content to contemporary culture. Christy McManus, a fifth-grade English language arts and social studies teacher at Chester County Middle School in Henderson was honored for equipping her students with the end goal in mind: a college-ready twelfth grader.

Voiles follows Cathy Whitehead, a third-grade teacher from Chester County, who served as Tennessee’s 2015-16 Teacher of the Year. Whitehead teaches at West Chester Elementary School in Henderson in West Tennessee.